QI The Book of the Dead

Blake’s marriage that he tried to persuade Catherine to experiment with a more open relationship, perhaps through the introduction of a young unmarried woman as a sexual partner, and that she rejected this tearfully. A strong sexual element runs through all Blake’s work and his nonconformist religious background may have instilled in him some radical ideas. London in the 1780s was home to a number of religious groups known as ‘antinomians’. The term means, literally, ‘lawless’ and it was used – usually as a term of abuse – to describe extreme Protestants whose belief in ‘justification by faith alone’ meant that they were supposedly able to ignore normal morality. His mother had been brought up as a Moravian, the oldest of the Protestant sects, founded in the late fourteenth century in the area of central Europe after which it was named. His father was a follower of Emmanuel Swedenborg(1688–1772), the Swedish scientist, theologian and mystic. There is some evidence of open marriages being tolerated among both Moravians and Swedenborgians. The recent discovery and publication of Swedenborg’s Spiritual Diary has inflamed this further. Swedenborg – who was a Moravian for a while – practised an intensely sexual mysticism. He had researched in detail the attainment of spiritual ecstasy by delaying orgasm, as practised by some Kabbalistic Jewish sects and by the Tantric school of Buddhism.
    How much Blake was aware of this we shall never know: the more pious-minded of his friends destroyed most of his explicitly erotic drawings and manuscripts after his death. What we do know is that Swedenborg’s best known work, Heaven and Hell (1758), was a major influence on Blake. One of Blake’s engravings shows a female figure whose vulva has been translated into an altar, with an erect penis standing like a holy statue at its centre. This is a visual representation of Swedenborg’s idea of sex as a religious sacrament.
    Blake was unambiguous on the importance of sex in marriage:
    Abstinence sows sand all over
The ruddy limbs & flaming hair
But Desire Gratified
Plants fruits of life & beauty there
In a wife I would desire
What in whores is always found
The lineaments of Gratified desire
     
    One day, Blake’s friend Thomas Butts came across Kate and William sitting naked in their summerhouse in Lambeth reading one another Paradise Lost . Blake – far from being embarrassed – welcomed him in saying, ‘It’s only Adam and Eve you know!’

    In 1800 William Hayley encouraged the Blakes to move near him at Felpham on the Sussex coast. At first it was a refreshing change (‘Felpham is a sweet place for Study, because it is more spiritual than London,’ Blake wrote) but it was also wartime. The coast was under threat of a Napoleonic invasion and the towns and villages were full of soldiers. One day, Blake found one of them, John Scolfield, lurking in his garden. His assertive streak and his dislike of authority took hold. Blake accosted the soldier and ‘taking him by the elbows’ manhandled him down the street. A fight followed, cheered on by a number of Scolfield’s comrades, who were drinking in the Fox Inn. When it turned out Blake’s gardener had invited Scolfield into the garden, Blake was formally charged with assault and – a much more serious matter – sedition: during the tussle he had yelled ‘Damn the king. The soldiers are all slaves!’ Given the delicate military situation, a conviction might well have cost Blake his life.
    The jury acquitted Blake (the locals didn’t like the drunken squaddies any more than he did) but he plunged into a depression. By the time he appeared at Chichester assizes in 1804, he had fallen out with William Hayley and he and Kate had moved away from Felpham. Ironically, it was while he was awaiting trial for treason that Blake penned the Preface to his prophetic poem Milton that contains his most famous lines, the hymn we now sing as ‘Jerusalem’, sometimes called ‘England’s other national anthem’. Blake had loved to ride across the Sussex downs: ‘England’s green and pleasant land’ was his tribute to the magnificent view from Trundle Hill above Chichester.
    Blake died in harness, having spent his last shilling on a pencil to keep working on his illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy . He had been complaining for some time of ‘shivering fits & ague’and the ‘torment of my stomach’. The most likely cause of death was liver damage